And this is part two of the story: Microsoft has just confirmed the next version of Windows NT (referring to it as NT for clarity's sake) will be available for ARM - or more specifically, SoCs from NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments. Also announced today at CES is Microsoft Office for ARM. Both Windows NT and Microsoft Office were shown running on ARM during a press conference for the fact at CES in Las Vegas.

The Filesystem is not related to the kernel, or any other part of Windows, it is just a subsystem, NT could work with NTFS, FAT, or if anybody wanted too, it could use ext3, XFS, really anything.

Does Linux change to some other OS depending on what filesystem it is currently booting with? No it does not. FreeBSD does not change to Solaris just because you are using ZFS.

To be correct yes Linux does sometimes has to be changed due to what file-system it is booting on. Like Linux Secuirty Module SELinux require particular features from the file-system to operate. This does give a OS that behaves differently. Also booting a real-time Linux does have particular requirements in file-systems you can and cannot use.

Yes you stay in the same family but the Distributions cannot always remain the same on different file-systems to the point in some cases not being installable on particular file-systems as root file-system.

Linux has a kernel image and intrd that are loaded by the bootloader this does not have to be the on the filesystem that the OS will boot into.

Lets move over to NT. The bootloader of NT style OS's reads the Registry to work out what drivers to load with the kernel. Issue here bootloader must be able to read the filesystem the OS is on. So Windows boot loaders have a file-system driver independent to the "installable File System".

Anybody cannot use anything with NT. They have to be able to rewrite the bootloader and make a IFS. Where with Linux person only has make Filesystem driver for Linux.

Now nasty part with windows replacing the bootloader you could get on the wrong side of a update. So really MS is fully in-charge of what File-systems you can boot windows on.

Claim that Filesystem is not related to kernel or any other part of Windows is invalid. Its related to the bootloader that loads the kernel that also loads the drivers the OS needs to boot.

Linux can claim that File-system is not related to kernel. Since file-system driver can be bundled into initrd and loaded by any Linux supporting boot loader for starting up on any file-system you like. But then you have to remember the other points above. That not all Linux Distributions will operate after that due to the limitations of the file-system drivers.

Yes Linux distributions can be broken down into groups by secuirty design. So Linux is not uniform system. Talking about it as one item is foolishness.

FreeBSD is a Distribution from the BSD classes of OS's. Yes there is more than one in the BSD class of OS's and some of those OS's have file system limitations. Solaris again is a Distribution from the Solaris class of OS's but at this stage Solaris has not branched to having a file-system support differences in its class. Single distributions compared to Multi is really a mistake.